Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany

Introduction: Alternate Perspectives from Nazi Germany

■ xiii ■ introduction ■ Alternate Perspectives from Nazi Germany In his bold intervention into the controversy surrounding the “War of Extermination” on the Eastern Front, and particularly the participation of the Wehrmacht and its soldiers in this war, Bernd Hüppauf calls for new ways of looking at the photographs taken by soldiers and officers present to the crimes committed in the name of Nazism. Time and again, amateur images taken by German officers and soldiers on the Eastern Front in the death camps and the ghettos, and on the roads in between, have been understood in terms of their visual instantiation of Nazi ideology and, in particular, their virulent anti-Semitism. As Hüppauf articulately explains, this interpretation is predicated on two blind assumptions: first, that an image can be equated with the political allegiance of the one who looked through the viewfinder, and second, that the soldier behind the camera shared the positionality, the perspective, even the identity of those high-level Nazis who wrote and disseminated the racist concepts of Jews, Slavs, and other enemies to be destroyed.¹ Although neither of these assumptions stands up to scrutiny, such “misleading oversimplifications” keep the past in the distance and alleviate the potential threat it poses through extension into the present. Through Amateur Eyes addresses these problems of hermeneutics by looking from a unique perspective at a series of still and moving amateur images taken by German officers, soldiers, and civilians, Nazis and non-Nazis, during World War II. The book sees them first and foremost as amateur images. Due to the limitations and, at times, the blindness that results from the myopic interpretation of the gaze of the Germanas -perpetrator, I initially hold this perspective in abeyance. The interpretations of the images as illustrations of Nazi barbarity are based on the content of the films and photographs. Although Through Amateur Eyes xiv ■ introduction never ignores the images’ content, that content is not the only focus of meaning. In my analysis, the content—often violent crimes, propagandistic manipulations, or, at best, skewed realities—is one of a number of elements that informs a denser, more nuanced understanding of the images, how they functioned, and their significance then and now. The multifaceted nature of my interpretation is, in turn, the basis on which I bring images of and from the past into a dynamic relationship with their perception in the present. Ultimately, this relationship gives way to the possibility of new modes of witnessing the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. Thus my history begins from the novel perspective of the images as amateur, rehistoricizes the images, and subsequently reimagines the historical narratives to which they belong. It also considers the historical consequences of prevailing interpretations. However, at no point do I forget the ideological weight of the films and photographs. Rather, the ideology of everyday life in Nazi Germany as it pervades these images is one of a number of possible interpretations. We need to move beyond the singularity of the political ideological perspective if we are to acknowledge and draw on the full implications of these images in our efforts to remember the traumas of the past. And at all times, as Hüppauf would have it, my focus begins with the “concreteness of details and the iconography of the pictures[s and] . . . make[s] ‘visible’ what can be seen in the photos and break[s] the blockade of silence.”² If there is discomfort in looking at and analyzing images of the trauma of those who suffered, we can be reassured by Georges Didi-Huberman’s forceful argument that looking at such images is in itself an act that counters the dictates and desires of the Nazis. The members of the higher command did everything they could to eradicate all trace of their monstrous activities both during and at the end of the war. Thus, to look at and judge images of their crimes is, after Blanchot, to make visible that which they were determined would remain invisible.³ Didi-Huberman argues for the imperatives of first imagining, and then being open to interpretations and efforts at memorializing and witnessing the Holocaust, efforts that might otherwise be seen as a violation of the victims’ suffering . He discusses four images that were taken from inside the gas chamber of Crematorium V and subsequently smuggled out of Auschwitz by introduction...